Hog Killing Time. This recollection by novelist Harry Crews describes the ritual of killing and processing hogs on the farm where he grew up in Bacon County in rural south Georgia.

Farm families swapped labor at hog-killing time just as they swapped labor to put in tobacco or pick cotton. Early one morning our tenant farmers, mama, my brother, and I walked the half mile to Uncle Alton’s place to help put a year’s worth of meat in the smokehouse. Later, his family would come and help us do the same thing.

Before it was over, everything on the hog would have been used. The lights (lungs) and liver – together called haslet – would be made into a fresh stew by first pouring and pouring again fresh water through the slit throat – the exposed throat called a goozle – to clean the lights out good. Then the fat would be trimmed off and put with the fat trimmed from the guts to cook crisp into cracklins to mix with cornbread or else put in a wash pot to make soap…. After the guts had been covered with salt overnight, they were used as casings for sausage made from shoulder meat, tenderloin, and – if times were hard – any kind of scrap that was not entirely fat…. Whatever meat was left, cheeks, ears, and so on, would be picked off, crushed with herbs and spices and packed tightly into muslin cloth for hog’s headcheese. The fat from the liver, lungs, guts, or wherever was cooked until it was as crisp as it would get and then packed into tin syrup buckets to be ground up later for cracklin cornbread. Even the feet were removed, and after the outer layer of split hooves was taken off, the whole thing was boiled and pickled in vinegar and peppers. If later in the year the cracklins started to get rank, they would be thrown into a cast-iron wash pot with fried meat’s grease, any meat for that matter that might have gone bad in the smokehouse, and some potash and lye and cooked into soap, always made on the full of the moon so it wouldn’t shrink.

“Hog-Killing Time” is from A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews. Reprinted in The Best of Georgia Farms Cookbook and Tour Book and used by permission. Buy a copy of A Childhood from Amazon.

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